


Opia

by orphan_account



Series: threads of memory [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:47:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25757599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Opia(n.) The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell, Lan Fan/Ling Yao, Mei Chan | May Chang/Alphonse Elric, Roy Mustang/Riza Hawkeye
Series: threads of memory [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1883734
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22





	Opia

**Author's Note:**

> You can tell a lot about someone by looking into their eyes.

Eyes are the windows to the soul.

Winry knew this. Every time she saw Ed, he’d always had a haunted look in his golden eyes. Like there was this weight on his shoulders, one that could never be removed. One that he wouldn’t remove. He took all the blame for what happened, hated himself for the tragic mistake that left Alphonse in his unfeeling metal body. His eyes showed the pain, the guilt that he’d burdened himself with, and the fire that wouldn’t die out. 

Now, the guilt was gone. The pain he had refused to leave behind was gone. His eyes held something close to _hope_ in their golden depths; hope for a life free of the searching that had taken his childhood. Hope for his brother. Hope for a family to call his own. The fire was still there; the single-minded determination that kept him going after all those years, even after anyone in his stead would have given up. But it was less of a grasping blaze, fueled only by guilt and anger. Now it was more like the crackling of a cozy fire in a warm hearth. He had a place now, a family.

And when he looked at Winry, when he thought she wasn’t looking, those fiery eyes were full of love. Like she was his whole world. He’d do anything in the world for her, and she hoped he knew she’d do the same—whatever it would take, seeing as they—childhood friends, as close as siblings, more than friends—got through it alive.

Winry had always had expressive eyes.

Every emotion that crossed her face was magnified in those wide, blue eyes that held depths you wouldn’t think of. Ed wouldn’t admit it, but he could spend hours just looking at her eyes. He had their color pinned somewhere between cerulean and sapphire, but his alchemist’s mind needs to know their _exact_ color.

Winry’s eyes showed her emotions at their most raw. When she made her automail, the artificial limbs that have let Ed stand up on his own two feet, her eyes hardened to chips of lapis. She knew he, as well as many others, depended on her for working limbs, and she’d be _damned_ if she didn’t put her whole self into their creation. There was no room for failure. It just wasn't an option. With Winry, it never was.

When she had almost shot Scar, her eyes had been filled with tears. There had been no real purpose shown in them, just hurt and loss and anger and a heartbreaking _confusion._ She had known she was never meant to kill, but she had been prepared to. He still didn't know what she would have done if he hadn't jumped in front of her, still didn't know why Scar had suddenly stopped upon seeing the two pale-haired teens sprawled in front of him, one crying and one determined not to do the same. 

When he would show up at her house countless times because of broken automail, her eyes would flicker between anger and--but if you blinked, you would miss it--happiness. He had destroyed her precious creation, something she had poured countless hours of work and creativity into. But even though he never called or wrote, simply showed up on her doorstep with a wrecked arm or leg, sometimes even leaving a trail of nuts and bolts up the front steps of that yellow house on the hill, she would always be happy to see him. She would always smile—at least after she had spent a good few minutes altering between enraged yelling and hitting him with a crescent wrench. But in time, those blue eyes would always shift back to contentment.

Mei could never tell whether his eyes were green or gold.

Her people said, as they always had, that an immortal man with golden hair and golden eyes had bestowed the secrets of alkahestry on the Xingese. A perfect being, they continued, dark eyes alight with wonder and envy. But even if his eyes weren’t true gold--the more she thought, they sometimes shone green-brown in certain lights--Alphonse was still the most perfect being Mei had ever encountered. 

His kindness and selflessness seemed to shine through his eyes. How they went soft every time he saw a cat, the felines that had been denied a place on the calendar but still found a place with him. How his determination hardened them—determination to help his brother, to help his friends. To protect, to serve, to guide, with quiet words and small smiles, feet treading softly on temple floors. The pure _earnestness_ that made him impossible to hate, that made him the first face to turn to, that made him more dependable than the phases of the moon. 

Unlike his brother, he hadn’t let his years of pain and fruitless traveling show in his eyes. They didn’t have a haunted look, nor the anger that the older Elric always seemed to have just beneath the surface. The fire that was ever-present in the other’s eyes was absent as well. His eyes didn’t have _fire;_ they had _embers_. The cooling embers of a flatlands cookfire, after the fire had slowly shrunk but would flare up again at the slightest touch, bringing light and warmth to all surrounding him. The embers held a good hunger, one for knowledge, one that wouldn’t let him simply sit by and watch. No, her Alphonse could never allow himself to stay in one place. He had too much of that happen to him already; his body trapped somewhere between imagination and reality, and his soul trapped inside a metal container.

Deep down, Mei knew she didn’t deserve him. This perfect being, or as close as one could get to perfect. What did a tiny girl from one of the poorest clans in Xing merit? Certainly not him, the kindest, most selfless person she had ever met. But she knew that his eyes would always look at her and see someone deserving of his love.

Her eyes were bright and expressive, a mixture of passion and intelligence swirling in their blue-black depths. Alphonse found himself noticing the way they narrowed when she was angry or concentrating particularly hard, and widened when she was happy or surprised. In the late-night periods where they would stay hunched over alkahestry books, illuminated by paper lanterns hanging from the rafters of the Chang residence, they would be scanning rows of characters, scanning the clumsy arrays he drew, lighting up when she explained the flow of the universe as she knew it.

For such a small girl, she had so much personality. All of her: the raging whirlwind of emotions, the compassion, and the determination, was all shown if you just looked into her eyes. 

Eyes that were bright and happy when something went right. When she successfully completed something difficult, when she told him a story: of Xing's beginnings, of the Eight Old Immortals, of the first alkahestrists. Eyes that were hard and commanding, when something didn’t turn out how she wanted it to or when she wanted something _done_. She was a princess, and no one could forget it.

Eyes that softened when she looked at Xiao Mei, her constant companion.

Eyes that had glared with so much hatred at the creature called Father, then with determination as she had boldly proclaimed that she would take him on alone. Eyes that had shed jewel-bright tears as he told her to use his soul to restore Brother’s arm. It had to be her, he had said. And it had. 

Eyes that had looked so lost when she had sacrificed saving her clan. She had chosen save the life of a woman who she didn’t even know the name of as she was bleeding out on a transmutation circle in an underground room. But under the hopelessness, under the tears, was conviction. She had done the right thing, and she knew it. 

When Ling had told her he was going to save her clan, her eyes had filled with hope. Her eyes were ones that could switch from anger to compassion in less than a second, and eyes that held a soul unlike any other.

His eyes had always been a source of fascination for her.

Black as charcoal, they gave away nothing yet forced you to tell everything. He could make you stop with one sharp look, one glare, one sideways glance. Except her. She was immune to him, as she always had been--when they had been children, when they hadn't known their places, and now. 

Unlike Edward, there was no constant fire in his eyes. Well--there used to be. When he had been just a young Lieutenant Colonel, his eyes had burned bright with the flames of passion and ambition, brighter even than the flames he called upon with his fingertips. He had been willing to do anything to get to the top. And if that meant using people, then so be it.

But after the death of Hughes, his eyes had lost their fire. He had had too much pride, too much conviction, and he knew it—he had been Icarus crashing to earth, so to speak, never to fly again. They were hooded, haunted shells of the flames that used to burn inside them—only dark ash and cinders. His clothes had hung loosely on his rapidly thinning frame, and Riza had been worried that she might lose forever the man she once knew.

In time, his eyes had regained their spark, but she was doubtful they would ever hold the single-minded blaze that they used to. They were more like embers now, lit from the inside like always, but without the flaming drive that used to propel him. He had been motivated by only one thing after his best friend’s death: revenge.

When he finally tracked down Envy, his eyes had changed again. They had seemed to hold their former fire. The wax wings had been mended, and he was soaring towards the sun once more. But when she looked closer, she realized that the fire she saw was merely a reflection of their shadowed surroundings, and his eyes were simply cold and dark, devoid of any emotion except an all-consuming anger. She had barely managed to stop him from killing Envy right away, and it had taken both Scar and Edward as well as her to truly talk him down from his rage-fueled rampage. 

He had seemed so lost kneeling in front of her, the true implications of what he had almost done catching up to him. By killing the homunculus that had murdered his best friend, he would have made Riza kill herself, the only one he had left. He had been Daedalus, hanging up his waxen wings in the temple of Apollo, giving up his flight forever, for it had brought him nothing but tragedy.

And when he had looked at her dying body in the underground room. His eyes, which he took great pains to never show emotion, were full of pain. They had lost any trace of fire, any at all. After all they had done, she was going to die, and he couldn’t do a single thing to stop it. Riza knew that he would have done anything to save her, perhaps even human transmutation, but he had recognized her eye signal. And his eyes had regained their burning quality.

Then, after he had been forced through the Portal of Truth, his eyes had taken on a flat gray color. Gone was the low burning of embers. Gone were the two obsidian orbs that gave nothing away. In their place was blindness, that single word that took away so much more than vision.

But when Dr. Marcoh had healed his eyes, when he had turned to look at her, to really _see_ her for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, the flames that she thought had been lost forever had returned. He didn't need wings of wax to fly, to carve out his own destiny into barren rock. And just maybe, Riza thought, they would be able to survive this together.

Too often, her face was studiously blank, no emotion showing behind coffee-colored eyes. Even when Roy had first known her, when she had been a slip of a fourteen-year-old girl, burdened with an entire household to run and a half-mad father to look after, she always tried to keep her emotions under lock and key. She didn’t cry, although she had all too many reasons to, and she was rarely openly angry. Her eyes had held a mix of the world-weary cynicism far beyond her years and the strange innocence of a child, not knowing life beyond the confines of a crumbling manor.

He had learned to rely on the smallest of changes in her facial expression to gauge her mood—how her eyes narrowed slightly when she was annoyed, how her jaw clenched when she was angry as she tapped her fingers rapidly on her desk, wishing for a trigger to pull. As far as he knew, he was the only person alive who could read these signs. He was the only person who could read Riza Hawkeye, and that was a feat within itself. 

Then, when they had been in Ishval, she’d had the eyes of a killer—tired, pained, with dark shadows underneath them like smudges of the ash he saw too much of. She had been the last person he had expected to bear the burden of those eyes. That had broken him more than anything else he’d done in that hell on earth; seeing the girl he had known wearing the face of a murderer. 

There, among blood-soaked sand and the blackened shells of buildings, she had asked him to do something impossible. She had asked him to hurt her, to hurt her with the flames she herself had given him, to destroy the legacy her father had put on her back. And, hating himself every second, he had agreed.

Her eyes then—they had still been the eyes of a killer, but behind that, they were the eyes of his teacher’s daughter. They had been full of the same sorrow and pain he’d seen in everyone surrounding him. But they had also been filled with relief. He had agreed to set her free, to destroy the memory of her father branded into her skin, the secrets his teacher had entrusted to the flesh and blood of his flesh and blood. And it had been the first time he’d seen her smile in all too many years.

When she had thought he was dead, in that terrible pale room that had seen too much of them, her eyes had been hopeless. No, more than hopeless—her eyes showed a woman who had given up, given up on living now that her purpose was gone. He had scolded her later, expecting her to snap at him, to protest. But she had been silent, head bowed, accepting her mistake.

When she had glared at him in the underground room, her eyes weren’t hopeless as they had been before, even though they had every reason to be. Instead, they were resolute. Determined. She had fully accepted that she was going to die, but she would be damned if he followed her.

Then, her eyes had scared him more than anything.

Lan Fan rarely saw the Young Lord’s eyes anymore. As the Emperor’s Shadow, she followed him everywhere he went, always two paces behind and slightly to his left, leaving no opportunity for her to see anything but flowing imperial robes and the back of his head. Although she would vehemently deny it, even to herself, she knew that she missed seeing his face, and his eyes especially. 

Unlike many of the other members of the Imperial Court, the Young Lord made no attempt to hide his emotions and keep his face arranged in a blank mask. He smiled and laughed all too easily, sometimes even cracking jokes with his scandalized senior advisors. When they had been children, he would try to make her laugh by sticking out his tongue and bugging his eyes out as far as they would go when Fu’s back was turned. He rarely succeeded, but when she finally gave in and let a small sound of mirth escape, his whole face would light up with gleeful triumph. 

His eyes had always seemed so…happy. 

Then the homunculus Greed took over his body, and everything changed.

His eyes were no longer dark and laughing. They weren’t the eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled, nor the eyes that flashed with mischief when he suggested an outrageous plan. They weren’t the eyes of the boy she’d shared peaches with in the Imperial Garden, nor the eyes of the young man she had sworn her life to protect. 

His new eyes were violet and catlike. There was no emotion behind them, only uncontrollable avarice. They were the eyes of something evil, something that wouldn’t hesitate to cut you down to get what it _wanted,_ to have what it _desired_.

Lan Fan would never admit it, but when she heard that the Young Lord’s body had been taken over, she had cried. A moment of weakness, something her grandfather would never forgive her for. Something she would never forgive _herself_ for. But it had felt so _wrong_ , feeling the sickening qi of an awful, deathless being coming from the body of the Young Lord. When it spoke, its rough, satirical voice was so different from his. When it moved, there was no trace of the Young Lord’s soft walk in its heavy footsteps. 

And still, its eyes. The constant reminder that _this was not the Young Lord_ , that this violet-eyed creature of sharpened teeth and avarice was _not_ him, not the Ling she knew.

When the creature had expelled itself from his body, his eyes had returned to their usual black with a mischievous glint, lit with the inner light of determination. Balance had finally returned to her world. 

But she would never forget the times she had looked to his eyes and seen only greed.

Her eyes were the only thing Ling could see behind that Yang mask, and even then, they were often cast in shadow. Tradition dictated that he must keep his head forward while seated on the Imperial Throne, trying to keep his composure from slipping while some Minister of this, that, or the other prattled on about percentages and the like. He could feel her qi, the presence of the faithful bodyguard he knew to be there, he trusted to be there, just behind the throne, silent and in the shadows. 

He wanted to look at her—to _see_ her, just for one second. When was the last time she had looked him in the eye? Ling knew the answer—when she had grabbed his hand to save him from falling off the edge of a building, her blood and tears mixing on his cheek as she told him of Fu’s death. Then, his eyes weren’t the ones he wanted her to see—purple and catlike, the eyes of the monster that had taken his body. After that, she had kept her eyes down out of respect, out of the tradition that bound them both.

Her eyes had been the same—wide and impossibly dark, making the pupil and iris indistinguishable from one another. He’d always liked her eyes—when they had been children, ignorant of their places in the world, he had liked looking into them with his own, trying to discern her emotions in their pitch-colored depths. He would look until she noticed him, when a bright red blush would spread over her cheeks and he would make a funny face, trying in vain to make her laugh. Lan Fan had always been a blusher—her emotions showed themselves in the blood rushing to her face and ears, all too often concealed behind her unfeeling porcelain mask that gave nothing away. But her eyes always remained the same—wide and searching, flicking from one patch of shadows to the other, constantly ready to fulfill her duty.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments! They really mean a lot to me!


End file.
